Girls' Guide to Delusion: Patti Smith and Deciding on Death

the girl who got the goodbye we all wish we had, and notes on designing grief

Lynn Davis - Iceberg #6, Disko Bay, Greenland, 1988

WHEN HE PASSED AWAY I COULD NOT WEEP SO I WROTE

Patti Smith is tied with Maryse Meijer for most frequent decorator of my bookshelves. Bookshelves, I fear, that will collapse onto themselves eventually. Above my bed hang the two parallel IKEA LACK shelves that were installed by a taskrabbit amidst my most profound moving-related breakdown. They barely hide my attempts at drill holes that came before them, ready to fall to the ground if my leg twitches in the night and kicks them from underneath.

I envision this fate often with a furrowed brow, and test their weight capacity with finger taps almost every day. Something similar to relief would wash over me if I had to say goodbye to these cheap, crumbling shelves over my own inability to lay still. I can preemptively project emotions onto this potential ending. And when that ending inevitably arrives, it will be as though the goodbye was meant to be all along, and I’ll act out the reaction I have already designed.

Patti Smith’s goodbye to Robert Mapplethorpe was the emblematically poetic, cosmically rounded out farewell that we all should be so lucky to encounter in our own lives. Though much of their relationship has been reduced to #goals-posting on tumblr, there is abundant opportunity to learn from the closure Smith seemed to receive at the end of her lover’s life.

On March 8, 1989, Robert and I had our last conversation. The last, that is, in human form. He knew he was dying and yet there was still a note of hope, a singular and obdurate thread, woven in the timber of his voice… I told him that I would continue our work, our collaboration, for as long as I lived. Will you write our story? Do you want me to? You have to he said no one but you can write it. I will do it, I promised, though I knew it would be a difficult vow to keep. I love you Patti. I love you Robert” (287).

To know such love in that moment, to be implicitly promised another side to it all, both in writing and in death. A continuation in perpetual motion, independent of the restrictions of just one life. This is a grief pipe dream, a fantasy that the few and fortunate are afforded. I envy this moment of closure to my core, having had a less than satisfactory goodbye with my own departed lover.

I use the term ‘departed’ liberally but literally, seeing as I have no idea what happened to Chris— other than that he left us. He had a lifelong habit of going missing, earliest documented in this incredibly angsty Reddit post from when he was sixteen. Each time he left, behind him would be a group of distressed and helpless loved ones. He gathered new people to be invested in his self-determined mysticism over the course of a decade. Our lonely cult.

His life little more than a series of goodbyes, wrought over his own inability to lay still. If heroin, bitcoin, sex, or fast food haven’t saved him wherever he is now, nothing likely ever will. These were the few things he worshipped.

I knew Chris less than three years total, within which he disappeared five or six times. There were varying levels of concern behind each of them, the worst of which led me to call a week off of work to drive around the state of Illinois, tracking the I-PASS history of the bright green Hyundai he had stolen from his sister.

Chris was a complete tornado. He’d invade your life without permission when you had no shelter to seek, you’d become swept up in the storm and revel in a moment of feet off the ground, because holy shit was he fucking funny and full of life despite it all, and you’d think for a moment that you had it all entirely figured out, only for his untimely departure to leave you windblown and amongst a damage of yourself.

We encounter

Space, fist, violin, or this— an immaculate face

Of a boy, somewhat wild, smiling in sun (17).

In all of this, I know I am partially glamorizing his destruction and the halfway relationship we once had. I will be perfectly clear in stating that he hurt many, many people in severely twisted ways. I fall fairly far down on this list, should we measure intensity.

The only thing separating my apartment from Chris’s was Palmer Square. Any time we decided it was necessary to have a conversation “about us” that never really went anywhere, all I had to do was invest in a three-minute jaunt across the park. Though usually he would be the one begging me to come meet him, I’d always be the one to wait a minimum fifteen minutes on his stoop for him upon arrival. Our conversations would evolve over walks in the neighborhood, as I never wanted him to invade the space that was my home, nor would I want to marinate too long in his.

One winter afternoon, after an abundant morning snowfall, the clouds cleared. The park twinkled in reflection while I waited for him outside his house that overlooked it. For a moment I felt whole on my own and envisioned him like a ripple in a carpet you stumble over if you aren’t careful. Barreling down the staircase, his freshly shaved head and chin were covered in razor cuts, none of which he attempted to bandage. He smelled like shit and his pupils were pinholes. Wreck my plans, that’s my man!

I don’t recall the details of why, but the purpose of this meeting was for me to receive an apology. In lieu of that, we traversed our normal walking route, skirting around the topic. I asked him at one point if he was high, which I already knew the answer to, and he laughed for a full minute before partially denying it. When we circled back to his stoop, he read me this Brautigan poem aloud:

I live in the Twentieth Century
and you lie here beside me. You
were unhappy when you fell asleep.
There was nothing I could do about
it. I felt hopeless. Your face
is so beautiful that I cannot stop
to describe it, and there's nothing
I can do to make you happy while
you sleep.

I was 22, I knew everything about it was wrong, but I was charmed nonetheless.

I don’t feel amorously toward my time with Chris, but it has undeniably informed my life in a way I am forced to embrace. If all I am left with is my narrative, then I feel as though I’ve earned a semblance of romanticism. I forgive this period of my life for happening. For the sake of myself, and the memories that are my own.

Did they harbor something wise, a discreet combination of the vicious and beautiful… Dead fish. Birds that whistled like ecstatic kettles. Drums, desire. Was he the sword, the instrument of a god or deluded and truly alone… (73).

My last conversation with Chris before he left us again for the last time was a screaming match outside of Cafe Mustache in broad daylight. I remember my white blouse, blue sky, and the train rumbling by overhead; encouraging me as I cast a spell to finally rid myself of him.

His face fell as I recounted the pattern we’d played out multiple times over the course of just a few months, and my intention to break this pattern there and then. How we repeatedly attempted friendship because of our seeming inability to stay away from each other, how he’d then drunkenly talk me into dating him again, then undertake a mission to epically hurt me— how I would keep promising myself that this was the last time; how I would keep falling short on that promise.

In my announcement that this was in fact was going to be the time I broke the pattern, something cosmic listened to me, and so it was. I rubbed an “energetic cord cutting” oil I bought from Augustine’s on the Saint Christopher pendant I had found buried in dirt by the Mississippi River months earlier. Total desperation. It was a spell, and it worked. From here on out, I decided he was dead, at least to me, and grieved accordingly. He went missing one last time a few weeks later.

For he, his own messenger, is gone

He has leapt through the orphic glass

To wander eternally

In search of protection

His blue ankles tattooed with stars (19).

What I would have given to have parted ways in love, to be assured of our distant cosmic reunion. To have known that the pain was all worth a reward I would receive in death.

In deciding Chris was dead, I was rounding out a chapter, seeking control from a situation where I previously had none. Devastation of my own design. In all the times prior that he’d gone missing, I was forced to preemptively grieve in envisioning a life without him. Though there was always relief upon his return, it was equally disorienting. He was a reckless vagabond that couldn’t commit to even his own death. So, I committed to it. I felt this to be my only option to actually break the cycle.

As Patti likens Robert Mapplethorpe’s death in The Coral Sea to an interplanetary, time-bent odyssey, she is comforted in the idea that his death is as temporary as his life. What I am trying to become more comfortable with is the idea that Chris is still somewhere out there, whether alive on this earth, or within me eternally. I wax towards forgiveness when I remember it is ultimately all mine to decide on.

He had come to the conclusion that each of us knows everything, for our destiny is familiar, she permeates our breath… Signs wave their arms as we pass over. Lovers avert their eyes until the quivering recognition becomes unbearable, and they part (63).

Patti has reached acceptance because she is sure of an ultimate cosmic reunion. To which I say: Good for her. In all of his comings and goings, the temporary nature of Chris’s many deaths was upsetting rather than consoling. I now consider whatever happens in the stars to be none of my business.

Perhaps the humbling realization that we, as humans, are never satisfied upon receiving closure, can be attributed to the knowing that nothing ever really ends. And though I can rest easy in knowing Chris will never be a part of my life again, I can perhaps also rest easy in knowing there is forever a figment of him within me.

That figment will continue to show up in surprising ways. My impenetrable affinity for independence, my ability to laugh at boyish humor that shouldn’t amuse anyone older than thirteen, my orientation toward self-respect that I seemed to lack at the time I knew him. That figment, of course, is mine. He was only ever a vessel to welcome it within me.

I seek solace in the clouds rapidly changing shape— one fish, one hummingbird, one snorkeling boy, pictures of gone afternoons… Perhaps a break is needed, an intermission of sorts, withdrawing from one scenario, allowing something else to unfold. Something negligible, light and entirely unexpected (97).

On the whole, I have been eulogizing him subconsciously in the year since I decided on his death. I am wary to attribute more depth to Chris than he ever outwardly expressed. I know now that he never wanted to be found, both physically and in identity. When he left, he meant to leave. Chris was never the love of my life, nor was he my problem to solve. Still, he was once my messenger, my reckless leg in the night.

Now I am tasked with the solitary voyage of making sense of it all, much like Patti in Year of the Monkey. I tether between not wanting to overvalue the situation by giving my precious thoughts and time over to it, and feeling the hurt so deep within me that I know it requires some reckoning. Perhaps all the hurt asks for is acknowledgment. No answers, no bitterness, just to be felt.

Grief, in this sense, is not only an exploration of the internal, but of death itself is as well. To know ourselves in these solitary journeys is to know death as well— To make yourself alone in order to know another side.

I did not ask the sign how my husband fared in whatever space was allotted to him in the universe. I did not ask the fate of Sandy. Or Sam. Those things are forbidden, as entreating the angels with prayer. I know that very well, one cannot ask for a life, or two lives. One can only warrant the hope of an increasing potency in each man’s heart (104).

Patti says, “It’s part of the privilege of being human that we have our moment where we have to say goodbye.” I was resistant to this truth at first, labelling it assumptive, because her comprehensive goodbye to Robert was the ultimate privilege. Still, our privilege of goodbye does not beg for perfect execution. We need not have any or all answers in order to bid an honestly human farewell. We are privileged with goodbyes on our own time. Grief, and devastation, of our own design.

works cited

Smith, Patti. The Coral Sea. W.W. NORTON, 2012.

Smith, Patti. Just Kids. HarperCollins, 2010.

Smith, Patti. Year of the Monkey. Penguin Random House, 2019.